Midlife Witch Hunter (The Forty Proof Series Book 6) Page 12

  He hung up on me before I could get all my spluttering done, before I could tell him that Robert was likely with Fossette.

  The urge to throw the phone across the room hit me, and then I thought about all the muscles I might end up pulling if I did it. Probably would throw my back out at the rate I was going. I set the phone down and leaned on the table.

  “How could Fossette take Robert?” I looked at Penny as I asked the question. “How?”

  Penny shook her head. “I don’t know. Because he is a guardian perhaps? Or she may have the ability to sense the undead.”

  I closed my eyes and took a breath, let it out, and then looked at my friends.

  “No matter how we look at this, we have to find the first witch. We have to find her, and when we find her, we find Robert. The question is how?”

  We decided to go out in teams of two or three to see what leads we could drum up in the shadow world here in the mean streets of grand ole Paris. Bridgette and Feish were out: Bridgette was not back yet, and by Suzy’s calculations, Feish would get to the house around dinnertime. Penny, Kinkly, and I were Team One. Eammon and Sarge, Team Two. Suzy and Eric, Team Three. And yes, Eammon said it was necessary to name our teams so we could avoid using our real names over the short-wave walkie-talkies we’d found at Roderick’s house.

  Eammon and Sarge headed out into the countryside, to use Sarge’s nose to see if they could pull up any leads. Suzy and Eric went into Paris to speak to a list of potential leads Penny had given them.

  Team One, aka Penny, Kinkly, and I, had yet to leave the house; we stood in the front entrance. We couldn’t seem to agree on a plan . . . mostly because I was worried Fossette would sense Penny’s magic and come for her. “It’ll be fine.” She just waved her cane at me and I had to dodge her. “Trust me, Bree. Fossette isn’t looking for another witch.”

  Kinkly curled herself into a ball in the palm of my hand. “I’m exhausted with all this bickering. Can I sleep in your bag for a bit?”

  I opened the flap, and she slid down into the bottomless bag just as Gran stepped out from around the door to the dining hall, smoothing her skirts as if there was a wrinkle in her ghostly clothes. I knew the move. She was prepping herself for a lecture. My gran looked at me and then sighed. “I forgive you, Bree.”

  My eyebrows shot up so high, I’m shocked they didn’t fly off my damn face. I couldn’t help it, I laughed. “Gran! The spell was keyed to Robert! If I’d tried to use it for you, it would have been wasted.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “That’s not how the spell works. Only one person could have made it for Karissa, and there’s no way they would have been able to key it solely to Robert. She just wanted you to believe that. To see if you’d do it. To see who you loved best.”

  Penny tapped her cane. “That’s not true, Celia. And would you have had the girl waste the offering?”

  Gran huffed as she flowed along next to the table. “I know of what I speak. But no one wanted to listen to a dead woman.”

  I held up both hands to my gran. “Stop. I’m sorry. If what you’re saying is true, I would have chosen to bring you back, a thousand times over. Gran, I love you. I hope you know that?”

  She sighed and crossed her arms before looking me in the eye. “Yes, my girl, I know. Karissa is a tricky one, and she pulled a fast one on you this time.”

  Yes, that tricky bitch surely had pulled one over on me. And I’d been exhausted, heartsick, and desperate enough to cling to the first hopeful thing I came across. In this case, the possibility of bringing one of my friends back.

  Now, if I wanted to save him, I had to find the first witch and a cure for vampirism? Was that even possible? “Where do you think we should start?” I asked Penny.

  “I’ve never been to Paris before.” Penny tapped her cane on the ground then, swung it toward Gran. “But Celia has.”

  My gran bobbed her head. “Let’s go to Maison Magique. It’s the equivalent of Death Row back home. Much more French, of course.” With a silent swish of her skirts, she led the way. My eyes swept over the streets, the people, the architecture of the city, but I was numb to the beauty and history. I wished I could take the time and brain bandwidth to appreciate it, but I had a job to do, and I wanted to get it done as soon as possible so that I could find Robert. Of course, finding Robert would offer its own set of problems. “Gran, how far?”

  “Twenty-minute walk,” she said. “Why?”

  “Time for twenty questions. What happens when we find Robert? How do we stop him from, you know, becoming a vampire?” I asked.

  Penny and my gran exchanged a look that I really did not like. My guts tightened, a sudden ache flared in my back, and the world kind of fuzzed. Because they didn’t need to say it out loud for me to understand. “That can’t be the only answer,” I whispered. “You can’t mean that the only way to save him—”

  Penny looped an arm through mine. I wasn’t sure if she needed the support, or she thought I did. Her grip tightened on me. Yup, she thought I needed the support.

  “He has two options. Either he becomes a vampire, or he dies. There is no turning back now for him, or for you.”

  Chapter

  Fourteen

  Penny’s words haunted me all the way to Maison Magique—the French equivalent to our Death Row back in Savannah.

  Robert would either turn fully into a vampire, or he would die. Was that even a choice? I mean, both of those options meant a certain kind of death. If the beauty of Paris had been lost on me before, it was even more so for the next twenty minutes as we wove our way through the streets, following my gran.

  “Here, this is the entrance.” Gran stopped in front of a bakery. “We go through to the back hall where the toilets are, but there is a wall on your left. Press the middle of it, right where the menu is stuck to the wall.”

  Penny tugged me along. “Come on, Bree, you can’t let Robert’s fate stop you. The easiest way to find him is to find Fossette.”

  She wasn’t wrong. I knew that. But damn, it was hard to think past the problem that had been shoved in my face. I wasn’t upset, per se—okay, yes I was upset, but that wasn’t my driving emotion. I was determined to think of a way around Robert’s predicament. I’d been given a puzzle, a problem, and I’d be damned if I didn’t solve it.

  There had to be a way to save Robert. Again.

  We stepped into the bakery, and the smell kicked me in the salivary glands, reminding me that we’d barely eaten for the last day. “Penny, tell me you have some euros on you?”

  With a twist of her lips, she went to the front and purchased something for the both of us. All I saw was flaky pastry, and when I bit into it, the rush of chocolate was unexpected. I didn’t care what it was—except that Eric was going to have to learn how to make it. Immediately.

  “Amazing,” I mumbled around buttery pastry flaking down from my mouth and the sweet chocolate coating the interior. “Makes the day better.”

  “La journée ne peut être que meilleure lorsque vous rencontrez une belle femme qui aime autant que vous la patisserie.”

  Both Penny and I turned, because even though I didn’t speak French, I knew enough to know he was talking to me.

  He was . . . stunning. Yup, that was the word. He looked like some crazy-hot hybrid of Corb and Crash.

  Salivary glands were nowhere near activated before. Now I was struggling not to let my mouth drop open and drool run down my chin. I managed a pithy, “Wha-att?”

  He smiled, showing off just the slightest hint of dimples. Square jaw, full lips, and eyes that were a deep, dark green stared right back at me. His dark brown hair was shoulder length but swept back. “Excuse me, I did not realize you were American. I said simply that the day can only be better when you meet a beautiful woman who loves pastry as much as you do.”

  He held out his hand, and the cashier—who was also staring as if she’d been hit with the same stick as me—gave him the same flaky pastry.

  And then we all watched him take a bite of it. With a silent laugh, he shook his head. “May your day be as good as your pastry.”

  I managed to pull myself together. Okay, okay, he was good looking. He was. But the more I looked at him, the more I could see that while he was handsome, he really was gorgeous—he wasn’t as drop dead gorgeous as I’d first thought. Some strange scars sliced across his collarbones, and one even cut through the hair in his left eyebrow. He had dirt smeared across one cheek, or was that blood? I blinked, and my perception of his face wavered between top-notch model and bad boy who’d been rolling around in the dirt.

  I frowned. Was he changing even as I looked at him?

  He was staring at me, waiting for me to acknowledge his response, so I did.

  “Flaky, chewed up, swallowed and eventually pooped out?” I shook my head as I forcefully pulled my eyes from him. “No thanks. Penny, let’s go. He’s wearing a glamour of some sort.”

  He was no No-face Bruce, but he was trying to hide his scars. I could both respect that, and still think that it suggested he was trouble.

  I tucked my arm through hers and started toward the front of the pastry shop. She dug her heels in. “No, no, we go to the back, remember?”

  Of course. We hadn’t come just for sweets. Penny directed us to the back, passing one more glance over her shoulder. “That is a handsome man.”

  “Glamour, remember? He’s hiding who he really is.”

  Penny startled. “No doubt he is headed to Maison Magique, the same as us then. He is trying to hide what he truly looks like, and you can see through it.”

  I grimaced. I’d had enough of all these hot supernatural men ducking up my life. Not that I thought this particular man was going to be in my life. More like the universe was just messing with me.

  “You are going to Maison Magique?” The words, spoken in a French accent by a very pleasant, husky voice, followed us. I quickened my pace, all but dragging Penny to keep her moving. We shoved ourselves into the small bathroom. Gran was already there, pointing at the menu.

  “Press it,” she said.

  I did as she instructed and the wall shimmered, showing off a narrow door.

  So narrow I was going to have to go through it sideways. I grabbed the doorknob. Penny put her hand over mine and had me twist the knob hard to the left. “That opens it up,” she said. “Turn it the other way, well, you don’t want to do that.”

  Note to self, don’t turn the knob to the right. I almost giggled—yes, my mind went straight into the gutter, thinking about knobs and turning them left and right. I snorted and opened the door. The hallway—if it could be called that—was narrow and smelled strongly of straight alcohol. My eyes watered, and I coughed. “What are they doing down there?”

  “Distilling liquor,” the not-my-friend hot guy said. “A magic brew that will make you feel as though you have wings!” He laughed, and his laugh had me throwing an elbow at him because he was too damn close. He was all but breathing in my ear, damn it!

  “Ease off, bucko.”

  My elbow missed, and I stumbled back while he continued to laugh. “You will need to be faster than that, Cherie.”

  “Duck your cherie shit,” I snapped, flushed and irritated. Maybe it was another hot flash.

  “Focus,” Penny said. “Bree, focus.”

  “Bree?”

  Damn it, now he had my name. I shuffled along, breathing shallowly until we hit a nice sloping ramp that curved downward. Huge sconces were bracketed to the wall every few feet, lighting up the space and dispersing any shadows. If you didn’t count the massive open space to our right that went straight down into complete darkness. No railing.

  “No stairs. And lights!” I said, ignoring the obvious danger that could come if you got in a scuffle and were thrown off to the side. “At least they are civil.”

  Penny snorted. “We have to come back up this ramp, fool girl.” Gran was ahead of her, acting for all the world like she wasn’t already dead, clutching at the wall for all she was as she moved downward. I hadn’t realized she was afraid of heights.

  Still, all and all, it wasn’t worse than stairs. We shuffled at Penny’s speed down the ramp. I kept a hand on the wall because the other side was just that empty space straight down. “Kink, you want to shoot ahead?”

  I flipped open my hip bag, and she peered up at me. “What?”

  “Want to go ahead? We’re headed down into the Maison Magique.”

  She was up in a flash, her sparkles catching the light. “YES!” She shot up, spun three times, and then zipped down through the open space to my right, moving past the multi-leveled ramps we were using to get down.

  “Make good choices!” I yelled after her. A grunt from behind us, and I held up a hand without looking over my shoulder. “No comments from the peanut gallery.”

  “I think it interesting that you keep a fairy in your bag, is all,” he said, completely ignoring me.

  I sighed. “Penny, men will be the death of me. Because I’ll tell them to swim when they are drowning, and they will have nothing but one breath of air, and they’ll use it to tell me that they are not drowning and they don’t have to listen to me.”

  She laughed. “There might be a few who would listen. You just seem to draw in the ones who want to test you, girl. At least right now. What does that tell you?”

  I frowned and shuffled down the curving ramp. “That the universe hates me? Or that I have terrible taste in men?”

  “That the goddess is preparing you to be more than you ever thought you could be,” the man behind us said, his voice softer this time. “My apologies. I will keep my thoughts to myself from here on out.”

  Nope, I was not turning around and looking at him again.

  By the time we got to the bottom of the ramp, there were no thoughts of speaking—at least not from me. My thighs were fully cramping, and I was dreaming of having a cane like Penny. Maybe I could cover it in rhinestones, really bling that shit up.

  “They’re worse than stairs,” I whispered, wincing as my right thigh spasmed.

  Penny sighed and leaned against the wall. “I wish they’d put in an elevator.”

  The man behind us slipped past with a nod but not a single word. I knew I’d regret this but . . . “Do you have a name?”

  Seeing as he knew mine, it was only fair.

  He paused and looked over his shoulder in a fair attempt at a smolder—strike that, it was a full-on smolder. “Remy.”

  I would not swallow, would not gulp. “Good luck with your shopping,” I managed to squeak out.

  His smolder turned into a smile. “And you with yours. Bree.”

  He left me and Penny, and she fanned herself. “Damn it, I wish you’d been around when I was younger. You seem to draw the best-looking men to you!”

  “They also tend to be trouble,” I pointed out. “All of them are trouble.”

  A sparkle and flutter of wings, and Kinkly was making her way back to me. She was still a bit gimpy with her flying, but it was getting better. “You are not going to believe who is here!”

  I did swallow then. “Crash?”

  She crinkled her nose. “Yes, but it gets worse. He has someone with him.” Kinkly landed on my shoulder. “You’re going to want to brace yourself, after what she did to poor Robert.”

  Duck me, it just had to be Karissa, didn’t it? I did not want to go bracing myself for anything. I swiped a hand over my sweaty face, tucked a few strands of hair behind my ears, and took a deep breath.

  “Fixing your hair won’t help, you won’t be able to look good next to her even if you had all day to prep,” Kinkly whispered. “You’d need magic to achieve that.”

  A soft footstep, and Remy stepped out from the shadows. “Crash? Is he an . . . enemy of yours?”

  I rolled my eyes. Obviously he’d been listening in. “Why, is he an enemy of yours?”

  Remy’s smile was wide. “We go way back. If I am correct, it might bother him to see you on my arm?”

  My lips twitched. “You want to piss him off? Aren’t you afraid of him? Him being a fae king and all that.”

  Remy laughed without any reservation. “Gods no, but I would rather like to see him flustered. And I have a feeling that you might just fluster him.”

  I looked at Penny, and she shrugged. “Could be worse than to show up on that one’s arm.”

  Could be worse. Oh, I wasn’t so sure about that. But hell, in for a penny, in for a pound.

  I held out a hand and he scooped it up and kissed the back of it. “Let’s get to flustering then.”

  Chapter

  Fifteen

  Yup, I wasn’t sure who was more flustered. Me or . . . me. Yes, the answer was me. Remy’s kiss on the back of my hand had been a sweet gesture, nothing sexual about it, yet there was a zing of electricity that had our eyes locking.

  “Damn.” Kinkly let out a low whistle. “Whatever mojo you got, I need. You could bottle it up and sell it for millions, girl.”

  Remy seemed suddenly unsure of himself. His eyes lifted to my face, searching for something. I knew I wasn’t that stunning. I was average. I grinned. “Rattled?”

  “Completely. Now,” he tucked my arm through his, “let’s go shopping, new friend. See if we can make that blacksmith sweat half as much as you make me sweat.”

  I wasn’t here to shop. But maybe this would be a good ruse to cover up our real purpose for being here. I looked back at Penny, and she waved at me with her cane. “Go on, I’ll keep an eye on things. See what you can find out.”

  In other words, we’d both learn what we could.

  The smell of alcohol faded, replaced by herbal scents. Mint, lavender, honeysuckle, sage, basil. I drew them in and tried to push away all of my worries and fears. Worry about Robert. Corb. The first witch. Crash. Yup, Crash was at the front of the list now.

  I breathed out and felt some of the tension leave me. The Maison Magique was an underground street, surrounded by buildings with multiple floors shooting upward. Unlike on Death Row, the wares were sold inside stores. A few people walked down the cobblestones, pausing every now and then to peer into storefronts. Lamp posts lit the way, flickering with different-colored lights. The stone walls were mostly dark, and different types of plants crawled up them, which explained the rush of herbaceous scents.